A Matter Of Perception

You are eleven years old, one boy among seventeen others from your class. All of you sit in a semicircle of uncomfortable chairs, listening intently to your teacher as she gives your first ever Sex Ed lesson. She explains the changes your maturing bodies will go through when you hit puberty, one by one. You wonder why anyone would want hair in so many places. The thought of shaving your face every day fills you with dread. The proposition of a wet dream disgusts you.

You glance around the classroom, lost in thought. Why does everyone else seem so… excited? Do they want a beard? Do they want to be so big, so tall? It doesn’t make any sense to you. Do they know something you don’t? Maybe you get used to it after a while, you think to yourself. Fear lingers in the back of your mind.

The lesson shifts to some sort of Q&A. Everyone will have a chance to ask one question without shame. You’re up first. Eighteen pairs of eyes burrow into you from all directions. They look to you in anticipation. Your throat feels dry. You don’t have any questions, can’t they skip your turn? Everyone is looking at you. Do they have to do that? You want to scream at them to stop, to close those cursed eyes shut and release you.

The teacher calls out in agony. Your hand crushes the last soldier’s windpipe, snapping the head clean off. You hunch over the corpse, driving your hands into the torso. Flesh and bone grow soft around your fingers, melting into a dull pink paste. It flows into your fingernails quickly, absorbed within seconds. For a moment, you feel relief.

You are thirteen years old, pressing your head against the bathroom mirror. A single hair, dark against your pale skin, is coming out of your cheek. It feels like a furred spider underneath your skin, pushing a needle-thin leg through it to the open air. You take your father’s razor from a drawer. It’s clean, and glints when you bring it to the light. You take a deep breath.

The blade is cold against your cheek. It feels wrong, somehow, when you move it against the hair. You draw it away, and realize you’ve nicked yourself. A small trickle of blood gushes from the wound, pooling on the ground around the severed head. You pick it up with your hands, crushing it into liquid. There is another soldier, hiding behind the bush, but he didn’t see you, so it’s fine. You breathe deeply, reveling in your renewed invisibility. There’s a buzzing in the air, the mechanical sound of helicopter blades growing closer.

You are fifteen years old, looking at your shirtless body in the mirror. It’s too thin, so your mother tells you, but that’s the thing you hate the least. Everything’s off - your shoulders are giant parasites, swelling beneath your skin, and the tendrils that connect to them are far too long to be considered arms. Even your eyebrows feel wrong, a thick smear of charcoal you cannot clean. You feel like someone twisted every part of you, bent and stretched your bones like soft clay before letting it bake and harden into diamonds. Worst of all is your face, a rectangular monstrosity roughly carved from pale white rock. Your father says you’re finally becoming a man - you’re already taller than him. It makes you want to vomit.

You’ve started growing out your hair, despite your parent’s objections. Your classmates have started to notice, giving you odd looks. One says you look like a Beatles member. You don’t understand why they find it weird you want longer hair. You don’t understand why they stare at you so much. Still looking at the mirror, you put your face in your hands and allow yourself to cry, the tears dripping onto the muddy forest floor. They saw you, all eight of them. Your eyes are pressed against your palms but you know they saw you for what you are. You feel their gaze on you, piercing through your hands and seeing the entirety of your face. It’s unbearable. You know where each one of them stands, from which direction they are watching you. You have to make it stop.

You are seventeen years old, standing in the women’s clothes section of a thrift store. You eye the skirts from a distance. You want the black one, you decide. What if someone sees you? You’re wearing long jeans, a baggy hoodie and an N-95 mask. What will they think of you? Crossdresser, pervert, fetishist? There’s only a handful of other shoppers in the store, but you’re hyper aware of them all the same. Maybe with the mask hiding most of your face, they’ll ignore you.

Enough. You need to do this. You grab the black skirt and tuck it under your shoulder, powerwalking as fast as you can towards the self checkout station. Your foot hits some ceramic oddity on the floor, tripping you. You drop the skirt and grab a nearby clothesline for support, managing not to fall over completely. But the damage is done. Everyone, from the cashier to the girl trying out shoes in the back, has turned to stare at you. They know. Your heart beats madly in your chest.

You mutter a pathetic apology and duck beneath the aisles. A good five minutes pass before you finally bring yourself to the self checkout, pay for the skirt, and leave the store. The moment you set foot outside, you sprint towards the squad. Eight automatic rifles open fire, the air exploding with sound. Bullets tear through your body, blood and flesh splashing around you. It doesn’t matter, your bones are thick, unbreakable, unchangeable. You slam your arm against a soldier’s torso, sending him flying into a tree. By the time he hits the ground, he’s nothing more than a pink puddle of fluid. The second soldier raises his weapon to block, but you grab his leg, rending it from his body in the blink of an eye. He falls into the mud.

You are eighteen years old, walking into your high school’s prom in a black dress. You love it, but hate how it looks on you. The way your shoulder blades bulge beneath the fabric, the way the sleeves hang on your long arms. You feel exposed, like a towering monster in a pathetic masquerade. Why did you do this? You don’t even have a date.

You grab yourself a colorful cocktail and wander the hall, wading through hundreds of teenagers. Some of your classmates stop to look at you. Why did you come here? Someone snickers behind you. You hear a slur. What did you want to prove? So many eyes. You wave to a group you used to call your friends. They look at you like all the others, staring judgmentally.

You thought that this time would be different. That you would jump headfirst into the icy waters and let go of your fear. But you were wrong. You find a pillar to lean on. You are afraid. Everybody knows. They see you, all of you, a deformity, an abomination, crawling and forcing itself into a human frame. Why won’t they stop looking. You sip your drink. It tastes like acid. Your head spins. You close your eyes, trying to shut out the outside, but it’s no use. You always knew when someone was watching you. You always had to be aware, feeling those countless judgemental eyes rip through your masks and gaze upon your naked self.

It is fact. It is reality. You can no more change it than you can change your accursed bones, the warped bars of your prison. It is in this moment that that realization truly hits you, and you break them like twigs, one after the other. Your flesh is torn and burned and riddled with holes, but it regrows just as quickly around your eternal skeleton. The soldiers fall, their weapons shattered, their own bodies turned to soup at your feet. You bend down, drinking them with your fingers and your mouth.

You hear footsteps behind you. It is the soldier from before, the one that cowered in the bushes. You pay him no mind - you know his eyes are closed. It is alright. He hasn’t seen you. He doesn’t know you. You finish your meal, and your vision goes black. There’s something on your head - a bag of some sort. It doesn’t matter. Tranquility washes over you. You sit down and rest.

You don’t know how old you are, but you know you are trapped. A prison of steel surrounds your body, cold, precise, and unfeeling. And your body in turn traps your mind, a prison of distorted bones far harder than the metal beneath your feet. You sleep, hanging on to the comfort of facelessness. But with time, even that withers away, and you pray only for your release.

In that regard, at least one man is more than happy to oblige.